Laura M. Pickel
Educator / Designer
During the spring of 2013, I attempted to flip my classroom. Because this was an experiment, I chose to find pre-existing videos that existed online and focus my energy on better understanding how the experience of watching a video at night for homework impacted learning.
Below: Powerpoint reflection on my first Flipped Classroom experience
Flipping my Classroom
A student’s math course at CITYterm, an experience-based residential semester program, is determined by the needs of the student, who is expected to gracefully re-enter his or her sending school math class with all of the same background knowledge as his or her peers. In pre-calculus, however, I had seven different students coming from seven different curriculums. It was too much to try to teach everything to everyone, but how was I supposed to chose which topic (and in essence, which student) I would teach? After stumbling through this my first year, I knew I needed to try something different in year two.
So, during my second year, I flipped my classroom. And, it allowed me to teach conic sections, parametrics, sequences and series and an introduction to limits, all at the same time. While it wasn’t perfect – I had to be able to quickly shift my mind between each of these topics in one class period and it generated a lot more work for me because one class suddenly turned into three or four – it made me feel that I had at least tamed the beast, if not slain it.
Below are presentations I gave to the rest of the faculty at CITYterm on my Flipped Classroom attempt.
After my spring 2013 test-run, I felt confident that my experiment merited a next iteration. As indicated in the next steps page in the previous powerpoint, I decided to focus my new energy on creating my own videos. While I thought the videos I found online were good, I felt like my students should be learning from me. So, I took advantage of existing technologies to create my own vides. Snapshots from some of the videos I created are below.
Below: Powerpoint reflection on my second Flipped Classroom experience
During the spring of 2014, I flipped my classroom using videos that I created using Educreations. One of the best and worst aspects of Educreations was that there was no rewinding or redoing. Whatever you said/did on your first take ended up in the final video. While this was beneficial because I couldn't spend hours editing my video, I would like a higher resolution video-creation tool.
